In September I went on a solo vacation to Cape May and I felt that I couldn’t entirely capture it the way I wanted using mere photographs and text, so instead I set out to make my first video in nearly five years. I’ve been going to Cape May since I was a child, and the script I wrote is chock full of ruminations on how it has affected me. I considered just dropping the script into the blog post here, but I’ve decided not to because I really want you to click on the video above and give it a watch. I probably will do a more traditional blog post about some aspect or other of this trip before the year is over, but for now please enjoy this video! I worked hard on it and I’m proud of it!

Probably most people who read this blog aren’t terribly familiar with my YouTube output of yore, but when it comes to travel vlogs I tried a few things here I had somehow never done before, like fading audio and video in and out and including little bits of the nature sounds in my source footage. I wish I could have included more ocean sounds, but I don’t have a nice mic for my camera kit so any clips of the sea had more awful wind noises than crashing waves.

It isn’t quite a perfect video — I wound up having to use footage and photos from past trips to show some of the things that I wanted to show, but luckily I am a bit of a digital hoarder so I had some choices! Also, there’s something weird about my voice over recording and I apologize for any unpleasantness about that. I think my microphone was picking up the sound of my ancient laptop’s fan, and by the time I realized that’s what it was I wasn’t able to do another voice over recording.

That being said, I really did enjoy the process of working on this overall! I’d forgotten how soothing and meditative the process of piecing together a video can be, so this probably won’t be my last project of this type. I can’t tell you when I’ll do another one. I know I for sure don’t really want to go back to the “talking head” style vlogs that make up most of my YouTube archive, since I now have this blog for posting those types of thoughts. But if I have the opportunity again to do something vaguely artsy like this and I feel inspired, you may see another video pop up here in the future and I hope you look forward to it.